Repsly

Repsly
How to master your field

On the wings of their rapid growth, Repsly became one of the few Croatian startups that raised venture capital in the USA and the EU to fuel their success in the global market. Fiktiv supported Repsly with a full range of creative services along the way.

Services

The context

Repsly has been focused on providing mobile software solutions for enhancing field activity management since its founding in 2010 as Salespod. Setting out to simplify processes for field teams and their managers, Repsly today serves hundreds of companies in over 40 countries and is one of the most successful Croatian startups.

Following their lean but swift growth, Repsly approached us to help them position their product on the market and communicate it more effectively. We started working together with their fantastic team at just the right moment to impact and shape their bright future. Having ourselves experienced first-hand the process of starting a new company, raising funds and developing new product from scratch with our own project Loccie, we could grasp the challenges Repsly’s team faced.

The concept

Starting initially as Salespod, which developed and marketed mobile sales software, the company organically evolved and focused to provide the next-generation solution for agile field activity management. Their products, strategy, implementation and approach where honed meticulously to simplify processes and erase bureaucracy. Yet somewhere along the way the design of the product as well as the visual communications of the brand became slightly misaligned with their mission.

Our joint goal was to realign all the faces of their service to communicate their true core values: simplicity, agility, friendliness, and intelligence. Salespod’s team already lived those values — a fact which created a perfect launchpad for the new Repsly. It also created an open environment in which we could all learn from each other and share expertise to advance their success.

From an early branding concept, this is how we summed it:

"It’s time to erase bureaucracy, to make sense from nonsense, to save instead to waste, to silence the noise, to break free from restraints. It's time to grow."

The work

The first step was to articulate the brand platform and make it so in an honest, direct way which would serve as a strong base for all other thinking. We defined its core, character, values, culture, looks, opposition, audience, and promise. Repsly’s team already had strong opinions on those questions which made the process of focusing them smooth and empathic.

From there on, the new name and tagline was to be supported with a new visual identity. We decided to do an evolution of the previous identity because the evolution of the product was also gradual as well as to keep continuity with the existing satisfied customer base.

The new interpretation of Salespod’s symbol communicated three things: location-based intelligence (map pin-like shape), direct link between the reps and the manager (communication bubbles joined at the tip), and business-improving intelligence from the field (pie chart inside the pin).

The color set was sharpened and cleaned up, while the selected humanistic open-source typography with single typeface for all communications helped achieve the right mix of professionalism, reliability, warmth and simplicity.

After the visual identity system was set up and elaborated, the next step was to completely redesign Repsly’s mobile apps. We defined the basic design elements and art-directed the implementation. The design implementation and app development was masterfully executed by Infinum. The concept behind the app design was to unify the experience across platforms and create a seamless, user-friendly look and feel that helps users get things done effortlessly.

In order to achieve a unified, recognizable character on all platforms we decided to design a custom set of icons, among other elements of the system. The icons were designed so as to match well the rest of the visual identity, being both approachable and competent, with a combination of sharp and rounded corners, solid fills which could easily be color coded, and legible when reduced to small sizes.

Simultaneously with redesigning the apps, we designed and developed a new, simple, responsive, presentational website front. In contrast to the previous one, it streamlined the content presentation, communicated the brand values and only the major product benefits, with a single call to action — to sign up.

The system was then applied to a wide range of applications, from business cards and email signatures to e-book and presentation templates, iconic illustrations for publications, and advertisements.

"Working with Fiktiv was, and still is, an insightful experience. Simply by asking the right questions they helped us articulate our values much more clearly than before. Then, they made sure that our visual communication, including user-facing part of the product, reflects those values. If you are looking for creative, pleasant and honest visual marketers look no further." — Marko Kovač, CEO

The results

In 2014, Repsly quadrupled its user base, closed a new funding round, moved its headquarters to Boston, and continued its rapid growth. The company leadership recognized the impact of good design at the right moment and had the courage to completely overhaul their brand and the user experience in all of its aspects. This in turn created a strong platform and became a vehicle for their future development.